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Read up to page 47 so far. I found the first few pages quite tricky with lots of speech from コーネロ, but the rest haven’t been so bad.
p44
Just want to double check my understand of くれる a little. In this sentence:
あの人を甦らせてはくれないのですか？
Does this have the meaning of “for me”?
So like, Are you not able to resurrect that person for me?
Yes, you’re correct about it having the meaning of “for me”. But the 甦らせて is not in potential form, so she’s not asking if he’s unable to do it, but more like, “Are you not going to resurrect that person for me?”
Ah, thank you for the clarification, seems I’m still mixing up my potential and causative forms a little, will have to keep an eye on that.
Thanks again
Well that was beautiful: the kanji 甦 is 更 (again) + 生 (life) which gives the verb 甦る
(as for the reading よみがえる I can’t see the beauty in it but I’m sure it’s there. よみ + かえる? read again? )
Oooh thank you so much.
Now that I see the wiki page, I feel like I’ve seen it before but can’t find it in manga that I’ve read, maybe it was in Satori Reader…
Ha! I went through the same rabbit hole a while ago, it’s in fact unrelated to 読み:
From the classical yodan katsuyō verb yomigaheru, itself derived from 黄泉 (yomi, “land of the dead, underworld”) + 帰る (kaeru, “to return”). The kaeru changes to gaeru as an instance of rendaku (連濁).
Now the question becomes “why is the underworld called the yellow fountain”:
From Old Japanese, first attested in the Kojiki, the oldest extant historical record of ancient Japan, compiled in 712 CE. Appears to be the older combining form of yomi (see below).
The ablaut or apophonic form of cognate 山 (yama, “mountain”). Mountains were often used as a place to bury the dead and were strongly associated with the afterlife. (Can this etymology be sourced?)
Orthographic borrowing from Chinese 黃泉／黄泉 (huángquán, literally “yellow springs”), incorporating the underworld from Chinese mythology.
Apparently in Chinese 黄泉 means underground spring and thence came to mean “underworld” figuratively.
Didn’t realize it but I did see this word before in an a VN: それとも……黄泉の国から蘇ってきた死者か
Can’t see an obvious reason why this kanji has these radicals! Probably maybe fish and grain are buried under some grass…
Yeah I only discovered the 甦 spelling today but it’s certainly a lot nicer than the more common 蘇. I don’t fully understand why 蘇 came to mean this given that the primary meaning is “perilla” (a plant). Apparently it has both meanings in Chinese too.
Maybe it’s just one of these cases where some ancient scribe couldn’t be bothered to remember 甦 and decided to borrow 蘇 phonetically to mean both, although that seems like a strength given the relative complexity of both kanji. Or maybe the perilla was somehow connected to “revival”.
I don’t know either, I tend to just ignore かかる and use context cues to get the meaning because this bloody verb has about ten thousands uses and spellings and at this point it lost all meaning to me.
Just loading かかる in yomitan and then scrolling gives me a panic attack.
Maybe かかる here just means “to start” or “to get going”, so here it could mean “after a few years I’ll get to plundering this country”. I don’t think that sounds very good in English but that’s as close I can get to the way I parse this nihongese sentence.
)
